


Empty

by draculard



Category: Star Wars Legends: Outbound Flight - Timothy Zahn, Star Wars: Thrawn Series - Timothy Zahn (2017)
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Aromantic Thrawn, But I've finished Treason so if you want to scream about it in the comments PLEASE DO, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, No spoilers for Treason, Thrass/Thrawn if you squint, Thrawn is sometimes (always) accidentally a dick, Touch-Starved, Trauma, Various ill-fated background relationships, asexual Thrawn, ozyly-esehembo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-26
Updated: 2019-07-26
Packaged: 2020-07-20 00:38:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19983178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: There are two things Thrawn will never understand. Politics is one.Romance, unfortunately, is the other.





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**Author's Note:**

> I sat down to write another fic entirely and instead I vomited this onto the page :^)

Romance isn’t prioritized on Csilla, which isn’t to say it’s unimportant. On Lysatra, Thrawn knows, marriage is considered by many nations to be the highest achievement in a human’s life; this is true across many Imperial planets. Elaborate, planet-specific rituals are set in place to bind two or more humans through romantic love. On Lysatra, specifically in Eli’s hometown, the common practice is for husband and wife to weave bracelets together, to exchange during the ceremony. Some couples share the weaving process with their families; others prefer to go it alone.

This is a concept the Chiss share. Their culture places more emphasis, these days, on family, loyalty, and ambition, but the historic expectation is that one’s loyalty should be to one’s family, one’s ambitions must be for their benefit, and one’s family must, of course, include a romantic partner by necessity.

Their marriage rituals are more muted than some human rituals, and more vibrant than many others. Honeymoon expeditions are popular with newlyweds — they last upward of fifty days, and couples frequently maintain their golden wedding paint throughout (this, of course, is a historic tradition which has seen a resurgence in recent years). 

Adolescent Chiss spend hours practicing the application of wedding paint. They stand before mirrors, alone and somewhat embarrassed but eager to learn, _to get it right,_ weaving the same golden patterns over the flexes of their cheekbones, the planes of their noses and brows, until they’ve perfected it.

This is not an experience Thrawn shares. He is aware of the various patterns and their meanings, but unable to reproduce them on his own face, and uninterested in learning how. There are similar ritualistic patterns for achievements at war; he is proficient in those. 

That’s all he needs.

* * *

He learned to say no to potential romantic partners only thanks to a pointed, embarrassing comment from Thrass. 

“You say yes to everybody, just because you’re curious,” Thrass said. “And then you decide they’re boring and you leave them in the dust.”

This was perhaps an ungenerous interpretation of Thrawn’s actions; he couldn’t deny it was also a fair one. Some people, more diplomatic than Thrass, believed that Thrawn never said no simply because he was too kind and didn’t wish to hurt anyone’s feelings.

Thrass knew his brother better. 

His first romantic relationship had been almost ludicrously young for a Chiss; he was eleven and found himself, for the first time in his short life, among people who didn’t think he was the least bit strange.

Navigators. And he was the only boy, and they were trapped on a ship together surrounded by insufferably boring adults, and it was inevitable that one of the girls would come to like him.

The issue, as Thrass would later explain to Thrawn, was that he didn’t like any of them back. Not really. He liked to spend time with them; he found them interesting and entertaining; but he was missing something indefinable, something Thrass had and each of those girls had. Something none of them could adequately explain.

One of the girls asked if he would court her.

He said yes. They were together exclusively for six months. This involved, to Thrawn’s dismay, a great deal of hand-holding and an even greater deal of isolation; whenever the two of them were off-duty, they were by necessity separated from the other Navigators.

At the end of six months, another girl — one of Thrawn’s friends — came to him in great distress and confessed her feelings for him. He watched her cry, flushing a light shade of purple from second-hand embarrassment and the pure awkwardness of the situation. Then, when she had finally calmed down enough to speak, Thrawn asked,

“You want me to court you instead?”

And the girl, breathless and wide-eyed, had said yes. So the path from there was simple; Thrawn found his current girlfriend, blissfully unaware of what had transpired, and told her matter-of-factly that they were no longer romantically involved. Then, quite logically, he returned to the other girl and informed her of his actions.

They held hands. To his relief, Thrawn found that this girl’s palms were cold and dry, a welcome contrast to his previous girlfriend’s warm, sweaty hands. To his further relief, this girl believed they could hold hands and ‘be together’ even in the presence of other people, without the long periods of isolation his last dalliance had required.

This relationship was, in some indefinable way, entirely more pleasant than the last. It endured two entire years aboard the ship, and one-and-a-half of those years were blissfully kiss-free. 

“Did you want to kiss her?” Thrass asked afterward — years later, when Thrawn described this aspect of his childhood. Thrass was uncommonly solemn, almost severe, and Thrawn didn’t know what to say. It was a complex question; he had, in fact, initiated the kiss. But despite that, he didn’t feel he could answer Thrass’s question with an honest ‘yes.’

He’d been curious, that was all. He knew that people kissed when they were in love, and from what he could tell, he was in love with that girl. He enjoyed her company; he looked forward to their time together; she was pleasant to look at from certain angles, and she had a wonderful singing voice, and she, like Thrawn, enjoyed nothing better than visiting the shipboard datalibrary. 

Tradition dictated that they must kiss at some point. Tradition perhaps indicated that Thrawn should have crossed this barrier a year and a half ago. So when they were alone in the datalibrary, Thrawn was already thinking hard on how to proceed when the girl lifted her head from her datapad, hesitated, and said,

“I’ve been thinking.”

She was blushing. She was biting her lip.

Thrawn was listening intently.

“About our relationship,” the girl said. “There’s...some things we haven’t done, you know.”

Thrawn nodded. This was undeniably true.

“And maybe it’s time,” the girl said, not meeting Thrawn’s eyes, “to cross some of those lines. You know what I mean?”

He did, of course. It was exactly what he’d been thinking. He sat up straight, watching the girl intently, waiting to see if she would make the first move.

She did. She opened her mouth, took a deep breath.

And instead of kissing him, she said, “I love you, Thrawn.”

He was disappointed, of course. It took him a moment to recalibrate. “I love you, too,” he said quickly, automatically. There was nothing inherently interesting about these words; he’d said them before to his parents, to Thrass, and to his last girlfriend. What he was interested in was _new_ experiences.

So he took the girl’s hand and squeezed it. So he leaned in close, one hand brushing back her hair. So he pressed his lips to hers in a gentle, chaste kiss.

The good news was that she seemed to love it.

The bad news was it sucked. 

Up close like that, Thrawn could smell her skin, and there was nothing particularly pleasant or interesting about that. She smelled like soap and a little bit like the chemicals used on the flight suits they’d had to wear that day for a drill. The kiss itself sparked nothing new in Thrawn — no butterflies in his stomach, no hint of arousal (whatever that meant), no … anything.

It was boring.

Thrawn pulled away, unnerved by the whole experience, and saw the girl giving him a radiant smile. After a moment, he gathered himself and smiled back. _At least it’s only this once,_ he thought. 

This, of course, was untrue. That first kiss was the beginning of six months of hell.

From that day on, the girl he was dating had no interest in the datalibrary, or in walking through the ship with him, or in talking to their friends. She enjoyed kissing, enjoyed it more than anything else they had done together, and she wanted to do it every chance they got. 

And each kiss was progressively worse than the last. She started opening her lips, so Thrawn had to learn to endure the stale, unpleasant taste of her saliva. She started poking her tongue into his mouth, and when that happened, the feeling of some terrible, foreign slab of writhing muscle in his mouth was so distressing that Thrawn had to shove his thoughts elsewhere.

He thought about battle tactics. He thought about art. He kept his eyes open and studied the patterns on the walls behind her; he recited the last book he’d read to himself, as best he could remember. Anything to avoid concentrating on that terrible kiss. 

And it seemed to last forever. She could kiss him for an entire hour, well past the point where Thrawn’s jaw and neck were sore. 

He had to cut it off — but what could he say? His experience with romance was unfortunately limited. What few romances he’d seen in holos had all seemed to end only over drastic circumstances — cheating, abuse, even death. The only exception, of course, was when the plucky heroine found her True Love and was therefore justified in ending whatever previous relationship she held.

So all Thrawn had to do was find another person to date. It took him the entirety of those last six months to do so, purely because he had to be certain his target liked him before he broke off his current torture and plunged into the next.

She was an older girl this time. A Navigator with fading abilities, two years older than Thrawn and significantly taller than him. She liked him, though; he was certain of it, if only because of his current girlfriend’s growing jealousy.

So he did it again: he told his current girlfriend, with great diplomacy, that he had met someone else. The last time, this had gone off without a hitch; the girl he was seeing had taken the news stoically (though he’d learned from reliable sources that after he left, she hid in a storage compartment and cried).

This time, things were significantly worse. The girl was furious; she stood in front of the door and for a solid two hours, she ranted at Thrawn, alternately scolding him for his various flaws (some imagined, some all too real) and begging him for answers. Thrawn, bewildered, could only watch her with wide eyes.

When it was all over, he went to the older girl.

To his dismay, she kissed him.

* * *

Things went steadily downhill from there; the relationship with the older girl quickly went to places Thrawn didn’t like — and once again it was his fault, his initiation. He ate her out in the same storage compartment that first girl had cried in, and it was he who suggested it, he who undid her uniform and spread her legs, but he liked it even less than kissing.

The taste was totally intolerable. The smell was just as bad — but the older girl liked it immensely, and she rarely failed to coerce Thrawn into another session. 

He broke the relationship off abruptly, with no explanation, when she cupped him over his pants. That brief touch was so much worse than kissing, so much worse than oral sex; Thrawn found himself uncommonly alarmed by it. He left the room in distress; he refused to talk to her again.

His next (and final) relationship as a Navigator was cut off unceremoniously when he reached the age of fourteen and was processed out of the program. He informed his fourth girlfriend, emotionlessly, that this was the end; he had no expectation of a long-distance relationship, and he was able to convince her, eventually, that she didn’t expect one, either.

After that came a blissful period wherein Thrawn was entirely relationship-free. 

He reunited with his brother, who had already been adopted into the Eighth Family, and thought, not for the first time, that he much preferred Thrass’s company to that of his former girlfriends’. Soon, Thrawn was adopted as well, and it was a simple task to remain single for the next two years.

And then he reached adulthood.

* * *

His adult relationships were sparse and originated less from a sense of romantic longing and more from two simple, unavoidable factors: curiosity, which had plagued Thrawn since birth, and loneliness, which was tortuously present whenever Thrass was not. 

His first new partner (or, as Thrass acerbically referred to her, victim) was a high-born girl from the Aristocra. Thrawn, to the best of his knowledge, had only dated commoners before, and he could tell this girl, a fellow lieutenant named Strav, was interested in him as well, possibly because she had only dated fellow Aristocra herself.

This relationship lasted one month shy of a year. Strav was pleasant company, though sometimes grating; her politics and life experience differed greatly from Thrawn’s, but these were conversation topics the two could typically avoid. She was physically plain, but that mattered very little to Thrawn.

What mattered was that Strav, to his great relief, expected relatively little from him. He discovered quickly, through trial and error, that Strav required three things to keep her happy: that Thrawn should join her in her quarters when off-duty, either to watch a holo of her choice or to share an evening meal; that he should spend the night on their shared days off, which came around approximately once per month; and that he should have sex with her once a week.

This last one, Thrawn quickly learned, was negotiable. 

“I don’t like kissing,” he told Strav the first time she leaned into him, and she pulled back and stared at him in surprise, put off by his matter-of-fact tone. Realizing his mistake — and perhaps overcompensating a bit — Thrawn put on a nervous, embarrassed air.

“I don’t like the taste of saliva,” he explained. “I find the practice wholly unenjoyable.”

To his surprise, Strav laughed and, seeming relieved, confessed that she held no great love for the practice either. They agreed to avoid kissing for the remainder of their relationship.

This was a revelation to Thrawn. Before, he had simply endured whatever unpleasantness came with each new relationship; now, he knew he could bargain. He lost no time in explaining to her, with the same faux-embarrassed air, that he didn’t like to be touched, but that he didn’t mind (read: could endure) touching her.

Strav took this with good grace, though with perhaps a touch of concern for Thrawn (“You don’t like to be touched at _all_? Why? Did something happen?”). In the end, this worked to her advantage, so she didn’t question it much. Their once-weekly sessions were unpleasant but entirely endurable; Thrawn could remain fully clothed while he ate her out.

The relationship petered out on its own; three months in, during one of their rare nights together, Thrawn awoke to find Strav’s hand beneath his shirt, brushing over his nipples. He tensed so much she must have noticed, must have known he was awake — but she continued nonetheless, her hand questing down his chest and stomach to his hips.

And just as Thrawn had decided enough was enough and opened his mouth to speak, she wrapped her fingers around him through the fabric of his pants, and suddenly Thrawn found himself strangely frozen, his jaw glued shut. 

A peculiar cold sensation washed over him. He could feel her touching him, but he couldn’t move a single muscle. That old, familiar feeling of alarm and distress invaded his mind, pushing out all sense and logical thought. 

She started grinding against him, her hips pressed up against his, and Thrawn could do nothing but grit his teeth and wait for it to end. 

Later — when she finally released him and rolled away — when she finally went back to sleep — Thrawn lay in bed awake, his entire body one tense line. He tried to explain to himself why she had touched him despite his express wish that she leave him alone; he tried to explain why she continued touching him when he was awake; he tried to convince himself she hadn’t known.

When he was older, he would find it difficult to understand why he stayed with Strav after that. It was two weeks before they discussed it, and even then it was only because an older Chiss officer was court-martialed and publicly punished for raping a subordinate.

“I can’t understand how people do things like that,” Strav said. There were genuine tears in her eyes, and Thrawn could only stare at her, feeling hollow.

When he said, “You did that to me,” his lips were numb, his voice toneless. He expected her to deny it, or at least to be shocked, but instead Strav said,

“I know, baby. I’m sorry.”

And that was it. It was not, unfortunately, the last time Thrawn woke up to find her hands on him; each time it happened, he lay still and held his breath and waited for it to end, inexplicably incapable of fighting back. 

They were nearly at their one-year anniversary when Thrawn realized, perhaps belatedly, that Strav no longer had anything to offer him. He dreaded sleeping with her, of course, and he dreaded their weekly sessions in bed, but now he even dreaded visiting her quarters when he was off-duty, no matter how innocent their time together was.

He broke it off. She took it poorly.

Story of his life.

* * *

His next relationship was, for the first time, with a man, and it didn’t last very long at all. They were stationed on different ships and only met twice, the first time during a one-day joint exercise.

Cintas was older than Thrawn by ten years; he was, like Strav, rather plain, but unlike Strav he was an intellectual, with a keen interest in battle tactics, politics, Csillan literature, and physics. The connection between them was so strong and undeniable that for the first time in his life, Thrawn felt butterflies in his stomach.

This was helped along by the fact that he and Cintas couldn’t touch each other. They talked over the private comm display some nights, and it was clear to Thrawn that they were more devoted to each other than mere friends would be; their relationship surely hedged into the romantic side. But there was no pressure to touch or be touched, no expectation of kisses or sex or even handholding, and Thrawn could maintain this relationship with nothing more than a simple, “I love you,” at the end of every talk.

It crashed around his ears when they met again, one month later. Cintas had been transferred to Thrawn’s ship for a five-year stint; Thrawn himself only had one year left onboard, but that was one year of intolerable romance.

He met Cintas in person for the second time and Cintas smiled and grabbed his hands, leaning in for a kiss.

And Thrawn pulled away, heart pounding, with a sound like rushing water in his ears.

“I’m sorry,” he said, hearing the words come out of his mouth unbidden. He could feel Strav’s hands on his chest, on his thighs. “I think we’re more compatible as friends.”

He couldn’t tell for sure if he was lying.

* * *

The next two relationships were both with men, and both far more disastrous than what he had with Cintas, or even with Strav. Both claimed to be content with Thrawn’s no-touching rule; both were dishonest. For the first, this resulted in a relationship filled with unexplained bouts of anger or silent treatment; for the second, this resulted in something Thrawn might tentatively describe as violence.

Vrosi said, “I’m not interested in sex, either.” 

And a month later, Vrosi said, “You just need to relax. You’ll learn to like it.”

All things told, it wasn’t a relationship Thrawn was sad to see the end of. He was granted a month of shore leave shortly after the whole fiasco, and when he showed up unannounced on Thrass’s doorstep, he wanted nothing more than to forget it all.

Thrass held two domiciles: a spacious, fashionable flat in the capitol, near the Eighth Family’s ancestral home, and the small, rundown country home near the ice fields in which he and Thrawn had been born as commoners. Thrawn had last seen it when he was seven years old — when their parents were still living — and the sight of it now was so strangely familiar that it brought him to a halt.

There were small, faded handprints on the front door, and Thrawn suddenly remembered his mother guiding his hands into a pool of bright yellow paint, his father hoisting him up so he could leave his prints higher on the door than Thrass’s. Next to the door was a barren garden where he’d once helped his mother plant bulbs in the spring.

Now, the dirt was brown and hard-packed, covered with a scrim of ice. He knocked on the door, his closed fist coming down squarely on one of the little yellow handprints.

By the time Thrass answered the door, Thrawn was in tears. 

“Oh,” Thrass said, his face spasming with uncertainty and discomfort. Belatedly, Thrawn covered his eyes, caught off-guard by the sudden, uncharacteristic surge of emotion. He hadn’t cried since he was seven years old; he’d forgotten how totally the tears obscured his vision, how they burned on their way down his cheeks. 

He’d forgotten how hard it was to breathe.

Dimly, he was aware of Thrass’s hand on his shoulder — the first touch he’d sincerely longed for in years — drawing him into the house. Thrawn allowed himself to be led inside. He could hear Thrass’s feet shifting on the old floorboards, could hear Thrass sighing quietly to himself and fiddling with his tunic, but he refused to take his hand away from his eyes. 

“I’d heard it was bad, but…” Thrass’s voice was hesitant, almost inaudible. Thrawn focused on his breathing more than his brother’s words, trying to get enough oxygen into his lungs to stave off the strange sense of coldness engulfing him.

Then Thrass’s hands landed on his shoulders again, his palms broad and warm. Thrawn flinched; the coldness faded away.

When Thrass ran his hands gently down to Thrawn’s arms, Thrawn found he could breathe again. He stood there a moment, tears slowly drying up, as Thrass rubbed comforting circles on his upper arms, keeping Thrawn close.

Why was this fine when nothing else was?

“...but really,” Thrass muttered, startling Thrawn, “your commanding officer?”

Ah.

“You’ve heard?” Thrawn asked. His voice sounded absolutely appalling — hoarse and raw, like he’d been shouting for hours. He rubbed at his eyes one last time, wiping away the last trace of tears, and finally stopped hiding his face.

To his immense relief, Thrass didn’t take his hands off Thrawn’s arms.

“Of course I’ve heard,” Thrass said, his voice unconvincingly severe. “Your _commanding officer,_ Thrawn? What were you thinking?”

The answer was unacceptable.

Thrawn said it anyway.

“I was curious.”

“Curious,” Thrass repeated, his voice dripping with a tone of resigned belief. “Of course. You’ve always been curious.”

Thrawn rather suspected they were using different definitions. He considered clarifying the issue, but what came out of his mouth instead was,

“He said he wasn’t interested in sex.”

Unexpectedly, Thrass’s facial expression seemed to melt. His eyes fell; his hands went still, then moved from Thrawn’s arms to his back, beckoning him further into the house.

“Come,” he said quietly. 

* * *

It was unnerving to find himself here, among the strange remnants of his family. There were glass carafes arranged on a shelf on the far wall, each one constructed with varying degrees of skill by his mother. There was a caricature of an uncle he’d never met framed nearby, drawn by his father sometime before Thrawn was even born; it held no technical skill or polish, but there was a certain element of raw talent to be admired in the lines.

Scattered everywhere, dusty and forgotten, were ceramics made by his greatmother and painted by various unknown aunts; dull, old-fashioned knives designed for wood-carving, and the corresponding clumsy figurines made by his greatfather which Thrawn had once played with when he was a child; dried-up tins of face-paints used for ceremonies; wax-sticks lying forgotten under the furniture, worn down to stubs; massive rolls of near-transparent flimsi mounted on dowels on the wall.

Thrawn couldn’t walk without stumbling over sealed tins of all shapes and sizes. A wide, cushioned seat took up the majority of the den, and he sat on it gingerly, wondering if it was the same one he and Thrass had slept on as children. He snagged one of the tins off the floor and pried the lid open.

It was filled with colored chalk.

“I’d forgotten,” Thrawn said, feeling strangely numb. Thrass sat next to him, showing even more concern for the seat’s stability than Thrawn had.

“Forgotten what?”

Mutely, Thrawn gestured around the room, at the poorly-preserved, disorganized evidence of his family’s artistic skill, however unpolished it may be. Thrass reached over and plucked a piece of blue chalk from the tin, rolling it between his fingers. It had a strange effect on his skin, leaving a light coating of dust which made it appear almost like he had natural patterns of light-and-dark over his body.

That’s what they’d done as children, Thrawn remembered suddenly. The other colors of chalk they’d used to draw crude pictures on the walls, and sometimes on the ice outside. But they’d saved the blue for their own skin, each of them amused — no, entranced — by the surreal patterns of blue-on-blue it created.

He thought of the CEDF, where his holo-collection of art pieces — even his affinity for art itself — was looked down upon as a barely-tolerable eccentricity. He hadn’t been in a space so conducive to his interests since he was seven years old; he’d forgotten it was even possible. 

He thought of Thrass and his own barely-concealed obsession with fashion, and no sooner did he think it than he remembered the room tucked deeper into their small, cramped house, where his mother had kept rolls of fabric for Thrass to experiment with. She’d made all of their clothes when they were young, and Thrass had helped her. 

His thoughts dissolved when Thrass abruptly said, “I haven’t seen you cry since they took you.” 

Thrawn said nothing; he stared at the wall of carafes across from him, hands folded on his knees. After thirty seconds without an answer, Thrass said, “Of course, you never cried much, anyway.”

“Didn’t I?”

Thrass shook his head. “Not even in infancy,” he said. “You never cried. You rarely ate; Mother worried you were ill. And then — do you remember dislocating your arm?”

This startled Thrawn right out of his contemplation of the carafes. He turned to stare at Thrass, wide-eyed. “No.”

“This one,” Thrass said, touching Thrawn’s left shoulder. His touch seemed to burn right through Thrawn’s clothes. “You must have dislocated it a dozen times or more, and you never cried or — or even complained. You’d keep quiet about it for hours, until someone noticed you weren’t moving it and asked if you were hurt.”

Thrawn rolled his shoulder; it had never given him any trouble in his adult life. Never so much as a twinge. Apprehension settled over him as he considered the various ways a child could dislocate a limb.

“How did I…?”

Thrass shrugged. “Mother and Father would each take hold of one of your hands and they’d swing you between them sometimes.”

“But they must have done the same to you,” said Thrawn, bewildered. 

“Yes,” said Thrass, “but _I’m_ not fragile.” He bumped his shoulder against Thrawn’s, smirking a little. “And I’m not stupid.”

“Stupid,” Thrawn repeated, his voice toneless, his eyes on the carafes again.

“Yes, stupid,” said Thrass. “Stupid enough to say nothing when my arm is dislocated … or stupid enough to say yes when Vrosi asks me out.”

Thrawn did his best to hide the wince that briefly took over his face; he turned it into a smile. “I’m the youngest,” he said weakly. “I’m allowed to be stupid.”

There was no amusement in Thrass’s face. “You’re self-destructing, Thrawn,” he said. Thrawn could feel his already-muted emotions shutting down at those words. He twisted his fingers, suddenly wishing he’d never come home. “That’s what you can’t figure out,” Thrass said. “You’ve known you don’t want sex or romance for years, but you keep saying yes, and it’s not out of curiosity.”

Thrawn’s unblinking eyes were set on the carafes. They’d started to blur together until they were nothing but one big glass ball.

He felt Thrass’s hand cover his own and tried to pretend it brought him no relief.

“You’re self-destructing,” Thrass said.


End file.
